Cirrus@Austlit

'In just over one hundred days it will be fifty years since Michael Dransfield’s death in 1973. A half a century, as I have observed elsewhere, is a very long time in literature, especially modern literature and especially modern poetry whose history – influenced at least partly by the accessibility of poetry from what were, in the past, unavailable cultures and languages – is inclined to develop at breakneck speed. With a nice harmony, it is twenty years since the publication of this retrospective edited by John Kinsella which, itself, appeared after the two major contributions to understanding Dransfield’s life and work: Livio Dobrez’s Parnassus Mad Ward: Michael Dransfield and the New Australian Poetry (1990) and Patricia Dobrez’s biography of 1999.' (Introduction)

'One of the defining motifs of John A. Scott’s poetry and prose is the recurrent notion of an underground lying beneath the surfaces we are accustomed to treading on. It is the source of his interest in the myth of Orpheus – who ventures into one version of that underground in search of Eurydice – and the complex notions of creativity and death which, following Rilke and the late nineteenth century French poets, he teases out and deploys. There are many other undergrounds from the sewers of Paris in Before I Wake to the network of tunnels which underlie the reality of the events of N and connect distant times and places as well as distant and dissonant voices. The imperative for poor Telford in N is expressed by the sinister Esther Cole when she tells him that, if he is to uncover how her husband died, he will have to “dig deeper . . . not just for my sake but for yours”. Digging deeper is also the imperative that lies behind good criticism, differentiating it from material that considers that its task is, Petronius-like, to separate “good” from “bad”, and from material that thinks that its main function is to bolt a specific, contemporary interest onto a defenceless text and see how it matches up. Peter D. Mathews’ book, From Poet to Novelist, is an example of good criticism in that it sees its function to be to tease out what the underlying generative structures in Scott’s work are. It’s not an easy task since Scott’s books are, for all their superficial attractivenesses, immensely complex in construction.' (Introduction)

'The initial pleasure in connecting these two excellent books derived from what seemed their absolute difference. It was both rewarding and fun to actually read poems from each book alternately and I was tempted to structure what I want to say about them by seeing them as opposite poles of the poetic spectrum: the one being tonally inclined to the wry and in terms of subject matter very much about how we are located in the (comparatively) new digital age; the other, tonally serious and thematically concerned with how we live and interact with the natural world. A little thought showed this to be misguided: there are far more alien outposts in the map of poetry than these: “language” poetry, found, conceptual poetry, the various forms of text-fiddling, multi-authorship poems, and so on. In fact, thinking of as much of contemporary poetry as I know and imagining it as a map or many-cornered geometric shape, these two books would occupy a reasonably central position and might even be able to speak to each another.'

'Sarah Holland-Batt’s brilliant new book is very much built around her father’s long illness and eventual passing. Not only is it the subject of the book’s first of four sections but the final section, which looks like being – like the third section of her previous book, The Hazards – about place and culture, is distorted, as it progresses, into poems about firstly her grandfather and his place – Gibraltar during the war – and finally her father in the long concluding sequence, “In My Father’s Country”. Not that readers of Holland-Batt’s work won’t have met the father before. He appears in “The Woodpile” an early poem of her first book, Aria, chopping wood in what seems to be a symbolically significant scene: the stacked wood encourages decay and various kinds of spider although “the heartwood burnt longest”. And in “Embouchure” and “The Flowers on His Bedside Speak of Eternity”, both from The Hazards, we re-encounter him, this time in a serious stage of the illness. The grandfather, especially his painting, also appears in two poems of Aria. In the light of the intense focus of The Jaguar, these seem like preliminary sketches, poems more interested in the poet’s unease than in forensically describing the father’s illness and seeing how something so extended and debilitating can be approached by poetry. We also find a reference to her father’s death in her excellent book of brief studies of individual Australian poems, Fishing for Lightning, when she looks at Brendan Ryan’s “A Father’s Silences” as an example of elegy. She has a response that reminds me of my own when my first child was born: astonishment at the fact that the world seemed to be going on in its ordinary way as though it were unaware that something earth-shattering had occurred. Of course, she met with “things dying, I with things newborn”.' (Introduction)

'It’s always good to revisit the amazing world of Philip Hammial’s poetry, described with impressive accuracy by a quote on the cover as “a torrent of mischief, dark humour, idiosyncratic construction and invigorating chaos.” Dervishing is a two-part book made up of twenty-five pages of poems and nearly sixty pages of prose pieces. All but three of the poems are in one of Hammial’s familiar poetic modes, fairly extended pieces which are “surreal” in that their energy seems to derive from internal transformations as much as subject matter and which almost always create a shape by, in the last lines, returning to the opening statement or a variation thereof. And these openings are usually quite intense eruptions of a strong and slightly garbled speaking voice: “Only one Exit: climb the wolf ladder to the sheep sky & / jump”, “Work your Jesus: rob your hands of their money”, “Man must truss!”.' (Introduction)

'Books of poetry are usually more than a random dump of poems. They, like the poems they contain, tend to have a structure, sometimes loose and sometimes very tight. Its function might be positive: to show the poems up in the best light by putting the strongest ones first, for example. And it might be defensive: to resist a charge of randomness or to place poems near each other so that they give each other some support and deepen the context of any single work. Both these books – Rosanna E. Licari’s Earlier and Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian – raise the issue of book structure: it’s likely to be one of the things that a reader notices early on.' (Introduction)